Snobbery With Violence (5 page)

“Hecker in?” asked the captain languidly.

“I am afraid the master is out, sir.”

“When are you expecting him back?”

“In about an hour, sir.”

“Good, I’ll wait.”

The maid hesitated. “Would you not like to leave your card, sir, and come back later?”

“No, my good girl, I would not. The wretched man is supposed to be painting my portrait.” He loomed over her and she nervously stood aside. “Where is the studio?”

“Upstairs, sir, but—”

“I’ll find my own way.”

Harry went up a narrow staircase. A door on the landing was
open, revealing the studio, a vast room made up of two storeys that had been knocked into one.

“May I bring you some refreshment, sir?” said the maid’s voice behind him.

“Nothing, I thank you. Run along. I must figure out which is my best side.”

He closed the door behind her and began to look around. Now where would the wretched man have hidden the letters?

As he searched around behind easels propped against the wall and through boxes of materials which the artists used as back-cloths, Harry realized that this was where he worked but not where he lived.

He opened the door and went down the stairs again. The maid was waiting at the bottom.

“I’ve made a frightful mistake. I was supposed to call at old Freddy’s home to make the arrangements. He’ll be waiting there for me. Lost the address. Give it to me.”

“It’s at Twenty-two, Pont Street, sir. May I have your card?”

“Listen, I don’t want Freddy to know I was such a chump. Don’t tell him I called here first.”

Harry produced a sovereign and held it up. “Promise?”

The maid took the sovereign and bobbed a curtsy. “Oh, certainly, sir. Most grateful, my lord,” she added, elevating him to the peerage.

Harry hailed a hansom cab in the King’s Road and directed the cabby to Pont Street. He took out a half hunter and checked the time. If Freddy had gone to his home and if he had meant that he really would be back in his studio in an hour’s time, he should be leaving fairly shortly.

He strolled from Pont Street to a news vendor’s kiosk and bought a copy of a newspaper. He strolled back to Pont Street,
occasionally stopping to look at the paper as if he had just noticed a fascinating item. At last he was rewarded with the sight of the young artist he recognized as Freddy leaving his house. He certainly was a very handsome young man, with thick curly fair hair and a cherubic face.

The captain waited until the artist had disappeared down Pont Street. He went up to the door and rang the bell. An imposing manservant opened the door to him. Freddy must be doing well, thought Harry. The tyranny of visiting cards. He wished he had thought to have some fake ones printed.

The butler inclined his head as Harry cheerfully presented his own card and said he had just met Mr. Hecker in Pont Street and Mr. Hecker had told him to wait for him.

He was led upstairs to a drawing-room on the first floor. Harry refused refreshment and said he would sit and read his paper. When the butler had left, he looked around. The furniture and ornaments were expensive. Harry wondered for the first time if Lady Glensheil was the only victim of the artist’s blackmailing.

There was no desk in the drawing-room. He reflected that if there was a study it would possibly be on the ground floor.

He cautiously eased out of the drawing-room and stood on the landing. The house was silent. He went quietly and swiftly down the stairs and listened again. A murmur of voices came up from the basement. He opened doors until he found a study and went over to the desk by the window. He opened drawer after drawer. The bottom left-hand drawer was locked.

He took out a sturdy Swiss knife and selecting the tool designed for taking stones out of horses’ hooves, prised the drawer open. There were bundles of letters. He took them all out, deciding not to risk looking through them in case he was caught. Harry looked around for something to carry them in
and finally put them all in a wastepaper basket, then went out to the street door and, after lifting his visiting card from the tray in the hall, let himself out.

When he had reached the safety of his own home, he went through the letters and put them into neat piles on his desk. Apart from the ones from Lady Glensheil, there were letters from six other members of society.

He wrote down the six names and asked Becket to find him their addresses, and when his manservant returned with the information, he set out. First he called on Lady Glensheil, who cried this time with gratitude, and then he tracked down the six others, making sure each time to see them on their own and without their husbands. It seemed unfair that the six should get his services for nothing whereas Lady Glensheil had to pay, but he was afraid that if he asked for money, they would assume he was a blackmailer as well.

When he returned to his home in the evening, it was to find a furious artist on his doorstep. Hecker’s manservant had remembered Harry’s name. “I am bringing the police into this,” shouted Hecker. “You broke into my desk and stole my property.”

“I must say you have a bloody nerve,” said the captain. “Let’s both go to Scotland Yard, now. Of course it will come out that you are a blackmailer and you will be ruined.”

Hecker’s bluster left him. “No need for that. But I warn you—”

“No, I will warn
you.
All the money you blackmailed out of these ladies must be discreetly returned, every penny. In a few days’ time, I will check to see if you have done so. It would give me great pleasure to ruin you, but in doing so I would
ruin your victims’ reputations as well.” He leaned forward on the doorstep and smiled into Hecker’s face. “If you do not do what I say, I will shoot you.”

“You can’t do that!” Hecker turned pale. “This is England.” “Marvellous country, isn’t it? Now, stop fouling my doorstep and make a noise like a hoop and bowl off.” Harry put his hand on the artist’s face and shoved and sent Hecker flying down the steps to land on the pavement.

Harry let himself in with his key. He doubted that he would hear from Hecker again.

High summer spread across the English countryside. Society moved out to Biarritz and Deauville, returning in August for grouse shooting in Scotland. Lady Rose read, walked through the countryside, and sometimes thought she might die from boredom and loneliness.

As August moved into September, the earl received a visit from Baron Dryfield, who owned one of the neighbouring estates. The little earl was glad to receive him. Because of Rose’s disgrace, he felt ostracized from local society. The baron was a huge jovial man, a great favourite of King Edward’s.

“I need to talk to you privately,” said the baron. Lady Polly, who was in the drawing-room with her husband, rose to her feet and left the room.

“What is it?” asked the earl, alarmed. “What is it that my wife can’t hear?”

“You will shortly hear from the palace that His Majesty is going to favour you with a visit in September.”

“But that’s wonderful news. It means the scandal is buried. Great expense, of course.”

“Well, the bad news is there’s a buzz at court that our king
wants to try his luck with Rose. She’s become a sort of challenge, see. They call her The Ice Queen.”

“What am I to do?” wailed the earl. “How can I protect Rose? If he asks, say, to go for a walk with her, I can hardly refuse.”

“Bless me, I don’t know. But thought I’d warn you.”

Captain Harry Cathcart had been busy all summer. Word had got around, and in a society rife with scandal, his services were in demand. There was nothing very dramatic, mostly petty business which could be solved with shrewd advice, but his bank balance was getting fat and he now had a carriage and pair.

He found to his surprise that he was also much in demand socially. His taciturn manner, damned before as boring, was now considered Byronic. But he accepted few invitations. His experiences in the war seemed to have left a dark, sour patch inside him.

One morning he received an urgent telegram from the Earl of Hadshire, asking him to travel to the earl’s home, Stacey Court, as soon as possible.

The captain packed a suitcase and set out with his man, Becket. They took a hack to Paddington Station and the Great Western Railway train to Oxford, planning to take the local train at Oxford, which would bear them on to Stacey Magna, the nearest station to the earl’s home, where they would be met.

Harry was unusual in that he had bought first-class train tickets for himself and Becket. Normally the master travelled first class and the servant in the third-class carriages at the back of the train.

Half-way to Oxford, Becket fell gently asleep and Harry studied his servant’s face. After his discharge from the army,
Harry had taken to walking around the streets of London to exercise his injured leg. One morning early he had been in Covent Garden market, watching the porters carry in great baskets of vegetables when one of them collapsed and sent the contents of the basket of potatoes he had been carrying spilling across the cobbles.

“Bleedin’ milksop,” jeered one porter. “Leave him lie, Bert. Ain’t nuthin’ but a shyster.”

Harry had picked Becket up and supported him into a nearby pub and had bought him a brandy. Then, realizing by the man’s emaciated form that he was starving, had ordered him breakfast. Becket had fallen on the food, shovelling it desperately into his mouth.

“I’ve been hungry like that,” thought Harry with compassion, a picture of lying under the hot sun on the African veld swimming into his mind.

When the man had finished eating, Harry questioned him. Becket, too, had been a soldier, and having left the army, found it hard to get work. He had a thin, sensitive white face, straight brown hair combed severely back, pale grey eyes and a thin mouth. He said he’d been in the army since he was a boy but would offer no further clue to his background.

On impulse, Harry explained that he, too, had recently returned from the wars and was on a small budget, but if Becket liked to follow him home, he would find work for him.

And so Becket had fallen into the role of manservant. He could read and write and studied books on how to be the perfect gentleman’s gentleman. He only spoke when spoken to, never complained, even when his wages were late.

As Harry did not like people asking him questions, particularly about the Boer War, he respected his servant’s reticence.

Although Becket was expected to eat the same food as his
master, he was still thin and pale, but apart from that seemed healthy and strong enough.

Harry, resplendent in new morning dress and silk hat, arrived finally at Stacey Magna, to be met by the earPs coachman and two footmen who bore them off in a well-sprung carriage to Stacey Court.

Stacey Court was a Tudor mansion, built of red brick and with many mullioned windows which flashed and twinkled in the summer sun as the carriage bowled up a long drive under an avenue of lime trees. Harry was surprised to think of Lady Rose in such an antique setting. He had pictured her in a stately Georgian home with portico at the front and long Palladian windows.

Brum, the butler, was on the steps to meet them. Two footmen followed the butler with the luggage up an old oak staircase and then along a corridor which seemed to be full of steps up and steps down and threatening overhead beams, in places so low that the captain had to duck his head.

The room Harry was ushered into had a magnificent four-poster bed. A small adjoining room had been allocated to Becket. Somehow Harry was glad that his manservant was to be close at hand and not confined to the servants’ quarters, although Becket would be expected to take his meals in the servants’ hall. Harry was told the earl expected him in his study as soon as he had freshened up after the journey. There was a spot of soot on his shirt-front. Becket changed him into a clean shirt and bent down and gave his master’s shoes a polish.

“What will you do?” asked Harry after he had rung the bell to be conducted to the earl’s study.

“I will go down to the servants’ hall, sir.”

“Get on all right, will you? I mean, you haven’t been with other servants before.”

“I am sure I shall manage.”

Harry looked at him doubtfully, wondering how his manservant would cope with the rigid class system that existed among servants in large houses.

A footman appeared and Harry followed him along the corridor and then back down the stairs under the gaze of family portraits to the hall, where Brum was waiting to take over. He led Harry across the hall and into the study on the ground floor.

“There you are again,” said the earl gloomily. “I’m in a fix. Sit down. Have sherry. Help yourself. Have you eaten?”

“I had lunch on the train. Let’s get to business.”

“Right. His Majesty is threatening to come on a visit.”

“A great expense.”

“That’s not the problem. It’s Rose. I’ve heard a whisper that His Majesty is going to try his luck with her.”

“And you want the visit stopped?”

“But how?”

“Leave it to me.”

The earl and Lady Polly had intended to keep the news of the captain a secret, but Rose was accompanied on her walks by her maid and a footman. Two days after the captain’s visit, as she was walking along a country lane, she was only dimly aware of the footman, John, and her maid, Yardley, talking in low voices. But she heard the name “Cathcart” and swung round.

“What about Cathcart?” she demanded.

“I was saying that we did not often get callers,” said Yardley, “and John here was remarking that the last caller was a certain Captain Cathcart.”

“Back to the house,” ordered Rose and set off at a great pace.

She marched into her father’s study as soon as she arrived
home. The earl was asleep in an armchair by the window, a newspaper over his face. Rose snatched the newspaper away and shouted, “Pa! Wake up!”

“Eh, what?” The earl struggled awake and looked up into the furious face of his daughter.

“What was that man doing here?”

“What man?”

“Cathcart.”

“Oh, him. Just a social call.”

“I don’t believe it.”